Musings, dreams, thoughtcrimes.

The war against AIDS (we have almost won it)

There is still no cure for AIDS, but science has come a long way towards controlling it. Antiretroviral therapy has progressed so much in the last two decades that, according to current reports, a person who started taking the drugs at age 20 will on average live another 43 years.

And we can expect the science to keep getting better. Thus, a man in his 20’s who gets infected with HIV today can probably expect to live — by a conservative estimate — to his 70’s. That’s a remarkable state of affairs for a disease that only a decade ago was equated with a death sentence.

Of course, I still recommend that you use condoms when there is no intent to procreate!

5 Responses

“The catch of course is that (s)he has to be quite rich to afford the meds..”

A good point, and one of the primary villains is the absurdly long patent regime. It will be a good day when patent laws are reformed, or at least modified so that mere procedural change cannot count for a new patent (a cause that liberals and libertarians can agree upon?)

The good news for Indians is that Indian courts have ruled some of those laws to be inapplicable. So at least in India you can buy generic anti-retrovial drugs for much cheaper.

On the other hand, while ART is expensive, its costs are not much higher than other modes of treatment common in first world countries, such as for heart disease. If you have a reasonably good job, you will be able to afford it. And we can expect the costs to go down as research progresses.

According to this report, the costs will be about $13,000 per annum, and that is only if you pay out of pocket (i.e. your insurance does not cover any fraction of it). So if you are a typical math professor and get paid $60,000, this just means you will have to lead a $50,000 lifestyle, which is much better than what a post-doc makes :P

Actually… we might also be developing an immunity to HIV. A small number of people have a mutation in their CCR5 gene leaving the virus no way to enter their cells and begin the infection process. In a few hundred years of sexual selection…